Workshop about ‘Gesture’

Tag Archives: model

WOF – World Ornamental Forum

2017

INVERSE STRIKE! – A Call to Continue to Work

WOF is an open work, a spatial essay subject to methodological and thematic changes. The functions of current artistic research, pressing scientific questions, as well as new methodologies are inverted: rather than institutional, they become political. As a work-oriented space WOF is neither a networking platform nor a publication tool; rather it is an incubator for radical artistic and scientific spatio-discursive practices. It offers a structured site for discursive and material reflections of open work. An integrated event, it shows the reviving power of ‘the museum of the future’ as a profoundly critical place of research.

The current exploitation of critical and creative intellectual work has proven to be nothing more than the expansion of the historical exploitation of the proletariat. Beyond that, however, the increasing redundancy of meaningful work within cultural, educational and research institutions of neoliberal management, signals a paradigm shift.

The dominating institutional preoccupation with certificates, visitor numbers, compulsion of publication, employability, questionnaires, and quality control for cultural institutions, regenerates but itself and degrades the institution to an aestheticized form of neoliberal politics. In times of the obtrusion of totalitarian tools in public spheres, the critical question of not showing such aesthetic of non-aesthetic is highly relevant. Whoever refuses to stop producing intrinsic meaningful work generates an act of political resistance: Inverse Strike!

WOF makes a global call to continue producing intrinsic meaningful work, from 26 to 29 April 2017 at the Kirchner Museum in Davos; to show the urgency of your work, discuss it, and continue working.

Please send a three-minute video by 1 March 2017 that shows what you are working on. Not the question as such, but the fact that there is an intrinsic question, perhaps yet unknown, that gives a sense to your work is critical.

There are no registration fees, however, a binding commitment after acceptance is mandatory because your presence during the entire event is indispensible for a fruitful collaboration.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/Which key-notes would you like to share with all of us?

Ornament and gesture are remaining fuzzy concepts from my perspective. I ask myself whether it would have been a good idea to define them. The fuzziness itself might be the appropriate (meta-)concept, since from the perspective of modern organization studies we can leave “sharp” management concepts aside. Management world is full of elaborated concepts that guide manager’s behaviors – in the more or less right direction. At least most management concepts lead into a short-term perspective and prefer short-term goal setting instead of sustainable value systems. So what is it that fuzziness enables? I just don’t know yet. On the one hand, the manager has to be clear and un-fuzzy to his employees. Otherwise they would not understand and not perform. And the manager has to be un-fuzzy to the superiors to not lose his job – who would accept a middle manager who is not able to give “clear answers” to “simple questions”? On the other hand, and on a meta level, managers as parasites are the most fuzziest persons ever. By naturally losing contact to the organizational operations themselves over time, managers have to maintain the illusion of productivity even if the organization is corrupt, disrupted or not really productive any more. So, a major note from the WOF for me is, that fuzziness itself is a model for the unproductive productivity.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/What is the relevance of WOF in your work? How do its aspects reflect in your current projects and how could you imagine integrating the questions WOF raised in future projects?

WOF, as my personal think tank, is helping me to identify moments of fuzziness; my personal ornament. And gesture might be the sensation of moments of fuzziness for example in the Fablab, in unusual teaching projects like DiBuDeCo, or uncommon communication settings like Crealab.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/Which key-notes would you like to share with all of us?

It is quite simple to fold past events into the present, but to fold present events into the future and to forget anticipated futures effectively is a difficult task, particularly if there are distinct anticipated futures. The “coming” offers an adequate conceptual space in which such active forgetting of anticipated futures can be achieved through the passage of time.

In addition to stomping and melting as forms of setting and virtuality the expansion-form describes the affective and effective forces of spatial contamination.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/What is the relevance of WOF in your work? How do its aspects reflect in your current projects and how could you imagine integrating the questions WOF raised in future projects?

Thanks to all of you for making the WOF! You may have realized that I have not participated in the building of a model. The reason is that the WOF itself is my model including the question of its making. The WOF is an artistic research project that among other aspects examines spaces of freedom for art’s involvement in academic research contexts. This question is relevant for an ethical redefinition of the artwork and art practice in a globalized market-driven art world dominated by a consumer-friendly curatorial system of transnational large-scale exhibitions. Claiming that the art worlds of the 1970s were just romantic ineffective refuges would mean to disregard their capacity of transforming socio-political issues into artistic material exhibiting real difference. Today, contrarily, the art world seems materialized as consumable material representing the world’s capitalist infrastructure.

Philosophically speaking we could say, for example, that art is the exhibition of the potential of not not being. The wonder of art resides in the sensation of the freedom that it could have been radically otherwise – and that it is not. While everything exhibits itself as it is and thus cannot be otherwise, art exhibits itself as its impossibility of being otherwise and thus constantly reemerges as it is: and makes us wonder. There is an intrinsic connectedness between art and the world in which it is embedded: within the immanence of gesture. But at the same time art’s gestures can only be connected to aims outside the wonder of art. While the gesture of walking leads to a position, the gesture of art leads nowhere, to atopy, to a-position (just) so to speak.

Thus, the WOF is constitutive for my dissertation wall sandwich – The Architectural in Art Practice from Destruction to Non-Construction. The cave and the ‘studiolo’ (an Italian Renaissance intellectual translation of the eremitic cave or the monastic cell into a hybrid architectural typology of a bourgeoise “study” room) are exemplary spaces of the architectural as non-construction: a hole in the ground and virtual space. The cavities left by the footprints of “ornament” and “gesture” as well as the virtual molds of melting or expanding models constituted an experimental framework of non-constructive art practice.

The focal shift in the art world (and beyond) from architecture to the urban and the global (and beyond) finds an institutional parallel in the Swiss context from art & architecture (Kunst & Bau) to art in public spheres (Kunst im öffentlichen Raum). The WOF together with the concept of non-construction point beyond public space towards a virtual artistic infrastructure.